Dear Vermont,

I'm fond of your quaint white villages and graceful rolling hills, yes, but it's the other stuff
that brought me back: your hippy cabins and rusted cars, your outhouses and hard-luck
Budweiser-at-9 am hillside farms, your renegade marijuana patches and mustard and
teal colored trailers flanked by creeks and hollows and gravel pits and pines.

I came back for your ghosts. The ones I've known and the ones I haven't. Their stone
walls and cellar holes and woodland graveyards scrawled with names: Zipporah,
Ebenezer, Faith, Desire.

I came back for your water: Indian Love Call and the Whetstone Brook and South Pond,
the skin's memory of skinny-dipping at night; of the pond's early fog, lifting.

I came back for your woods, this northern boundary where deciduous and coniferous
meet—hemlock, spruce, maple, birch, and pine—and the creatures it holds: fox and
fisher, moose and coyote, the mountain lion's ephemeral midnight prowling.

I came back for your people, too. The way your craggy close-knit hills and small skies
have bred and brought obstinance, eccentricity, and goodness. Young hippies and old
farmers. Old hippies and young farmers. The flinty eyes of the intrepid and the opaque
eyes of the survivors and the breezy eyes of the believing.

Because like all good lovers, it's the complicated ones that stick. I'm not after what's
pretty or clear or easy; it's the strange and the secret, the pock-marked reverberations of
the past, that keep me up at night, that make the daytime sing.

So, like I said, I came back, and stitched my life into your accommodating skin.

I planted seeds in your rock-studded, fertile earth and birthed a child. I feed her on your
clear, spring water and ripe blackberries; I teach her the names of trees and the names
of the dead. I teach her how to piss by the side of the road and how to tap a maple and
how to catch a snowflake on her tongue.

Because it's not a slight thing, to know you like this. To know all the dappled
contradictions of your borderland: the textures of old and new, of light and dark. It's a
kind of knowing that follows us wherever we go. That tells us to look below the surface,
to sniff around and to listen. That teaches us to be unafraid of what's eccentric, or
broken, or wild. And maybe, if we're lucky, teaches us to care.

Robin MacArthur

Dear Richland,

At first glance, you didn't have much to offer other than jobs and miles of open space. Two years of
exile, we thought, working in a remote town that was cobbled together with secrets. A town two hours
from anywhere.

Driving east over the Cascade Range, we left the WA state of the imagination: evergreen forests, Puget
Sound, the Seattle waterfront, and entered a sparse land. Here the Columbia River snakes through
shrub steppe like a lifeline on a wrinkled palm. Tumbleweeds outnumber people. Like so many before
us, we came to you for jobs and stayed, even though your legacy is notorious. WWII. The plutonium for
the bomb Fat Man was produced here at the B reactor. You were America's town. People came to help
the war effort, to find work, to start a new life in a government town on the edge of nowhere. And all
the while you kept your secrets and theirs. Few people knew what was being built here until the local
the paper announced "It's Atomic bombs." Today many people would have a hard time finding you on
a map even though you're home to a national lab. Some of the finest research in the world happens in
your yard.

You've always been demanding, full of contradictions. It would have been easy to walk away. You tested
our commitment with dust storms, scorching summers, bone- chilling winters. But something about
you captivates. Just when I thought I knew you, you'd show a softer side. Your fragrance is the smell of
sage after rain. In winter eagles fish your rivers. I've seen pelicans circle you like dancers. The planes of
your face change with the passing shadows of clouds.

It took time for my eye to adjust to your harsher beauty. Two years, I think. Like others before me,
you grew on me. And then you shared your surprises. One star in a plentitude of sky over Rattlesnake
Mountain. A secret I'm tempted to keep.

Maureen McQuerry